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Allan K.K. Chan: Professor, School of Business, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
Yue-Yuan Huang: Assistant Professor, Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
Introduction
The nature of brand names
The value of a brand name is associated closely with its awareness, quality perception, and the customer satisfaction engendered by related products and offerings, among others (Aaker, 1991). It is widely recognized that brand names play a crucial role in marketing products and services and in their acceptance by the public (Charmasson, 1988), and may contribute significantly to the success or failure of new products or services (Kotler and Armstrong, 1997; Zaltman and Wallendorf, 1979). The nature of brand names in adding value to a product is widely recognized, and conceptualized in research under the brand equity construct (Farquhar, 1989; Keller, 1991; Keller, 1993; Lassar et al., 1995; Shocker et al., 1994; Dyson et al., 1996; Gurhan-Canli and Maheswaran, 1998). Extensive research efforts have been devoted to understand the contribution of brand name to the brand equity construct. It was found that with the investment in building of brand names via various brand strategies, there were outcomes or implications on brand associations (Quester and Farrelly, 1998) or customer-based brand equity (Janiszewski and Van Osselaer, 2000), brand extensions (Gurhan-Canli and Maheswaran, 1998), and brand loyalty (Baldinger and Rubinson, 1996; Chaudhuri, 1999). Several studies have been conducted to investigate the relationships between selected marketing mix elements and the creation of brand equity (Yoo et al., 2000), and results show that price promotion (such as price deals) is related to low brand equity, whereas high advertising spending, high price, good store image and high distribution intensity are related to high brand equity. Some other studies have focused on the guidelines and criteria for developing effective brand names (Collins, 1977; McNeal and Zeren, 1981; McCarthy and Perreault, 1987; Kotler and Armstrong, 1997).
These studies have been largely conducted in Western countries and on the products which are branded in Western European languages. A few recent studies start to look at brands in Asian culture (Chan, 1990; Chowdhury, 1999; Johansson and Hirano, 1999; Blair, 2000). McDonald and Roberts (1990) raise the question on the applicability of Western brand naming models in the Asia Pacific context. Robinson (1995)...